AUTUMNISM

"September approaching ... I feel I owe myself a brief respite of leisure and no rushing around. I can't face the dead reality. I want rainy days, lanterns and a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head." - Sylvia Plath

There can be a tyranny to summer at times: the relentless heat (admittedly rarer in the UK, though this summer has been a scorcher) and the distinct lack of shadows in which to retreat from the magnifying-glass scrutiny of the sun.

So, autumn is a time of year for many of us when we welcome the cooler temperatures, the gusts of wind that send miniature twisters of leaves into the air, and the chance to dust off our favourite jazz or jazz-vocal records to play while we experiment with a new type of coffee bean to mark the change of season.

I am still waiting for an Autumn in New York coffee flavour, where the beans are roasted in the steam of the subway vents and aired by breezes whipping up off Central Park Lake, before being ground by the tap-dancing feet of some Broadway hoofer and poured into a cup by a sullen-looking waitress with a fine line in sarcasm.

The pathology of loving autumn this much has a name (actually, I've just invented it), and it's Autumnism — a cross between autism and autumn. It's an incurable condition, and side effects include believing that New York is still the same place it always was in the movies we watched back in the day (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Manhattan, and You've Got Mail), a steadfast devotion to the wry sentimentality of Tin Pan Alley songs featured in the Great American Songbook, and the hope that somehow, the madness of the world can be solved with a kiss.

Of course, the world is becoming increasingly insane, and we stand about as much chance of returning to a more stable equilibrium as UK PM Keir Starmer does of admitting his penchant for Ukrainian rent boys. Still, playing great autumnal, leaf-falling music offers a temporary salve for the wounds inflicted by the demented age we’re enduring.

And one must never lose the layabout's eternal credo that nothing, and I mean nothing, gets in the way of the groove.

Especially the Autumn groove. ^^

Happy Birthday, Gorodish!

With love and squalor,

Digital Renegade

1st September 2025